DECODING DA VINCI THE DRAWINGS, JOTTINGS AND SCHEMATICS THAT MAKE UP LEONARDO’S NOTEBOOKS ARE PRICELESS GLIMPSES INTO THE NATURE OF GENIUS. NOW, MARKING 500 YEARS SINCE THE ARTIST’S DEATH, THE CODICES ARE ON DISPLAY ACROSS THE GLOBE. LEE MARSHALL VISITS THE FIRST EXHIBITION, AT THE UFFIZI IN FLORENCE E arly last year, in the penumbral light of Milan’s old Ambrosiana Library, I found myself staring closely at a folio from one of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks, part of the huge 1,119-sheet compilation known today as the Codex Atlanticus. Consisting of a series of notes on percussion instruments (music was one of Leonardo’s many interests), it is a lovely example of the artistry that the Florentine genius brought to even these most personal of documents. Casual yet crafted, the page alternates notes in Leonardo’s famous right-to-left mirror handwriting with drawings of wooden hammers, cogs, sound-wave diagrams and a trio of cute curly flutes, all of it done in sepia ink, arranged on the page with a graphic designer’s instinctive feel for layout. Then I noticed the rings: two overlapping circles of faded pink, with another, darker blob just to the lower left. A vision came to me. Hard at work, filling the paper from right to left, Leonardo (who worked on loose sheets that were only later bound into volumes) had allowed himself a drink, placing the base of the glass directly on the blank part of the page. Absorbed as he was in his work, he spilled a little while topping up (he was a lefty, and the stain corresponds with a left-handed pour). Later – blank parts of his notebook pages could be filled days, months, or even years on – he simply wrote and drew over the stain as further thoughts and ideas tumbled from his brain. Maybe it wasn’t Leonardo who left the mark. Maybe it was sculptor Pompeo Leoni, who, towards the end of the 16th century, acquired several Leonardo notebooks, separated the pages, and mounted them on large atlas sheets to create the Codex Atlanticus. Maybe it was a distracted librarian or scholar back in laxer days at the Ambrosiana, which has owned the codex since 1637, or maybe it was Napoleon, who seized the volume after invading Milan in 1796. (Kept briefly in Paris, it was given back in 1815 after his defeat.) Conscious of the fact that, as leading Leonardo scholar Martin Kemp puts it in his latest book, Living with Leonardo, the artist’s life and works “have become repositories for wild theories to a degree that is not matched by any other figure”, I will leave my own personal contribution to Leonardo studies there for the experts and carbon daters to demolish. The point of my tale is simply this: the codices bring us close to Leonardo da Vinci in a way that nothing else does, not even the delicate brushstrokes in the rivulet pattern in the hair of the Mona Lisa (and good luck with glimpsing those at the Louvre behind the security barrier and the bulletproof-glass case). Last October at the Uffizi in Florence, with financial support from the Florentine fashion company, Stefano Ricci, four of the Ambrosiana sheets along with 13 others from around the world joined what is considered one of Leonardo’s most precious codices, known as the Codex Leicester. The artist began to compile this codex in Florence in 1504. It was last displayed in the Tuscan city in 1982, when it was called the Codex Hammer, after its then owner, oil magnate Armand Hammer. Bill Gates, who bought it at auction in 1994, broke with tradition and changed the name of the 72-page notebook back to its pre-Hammer title, Codex Leicester, after the British earl who had purchased it in 1719. “Codex Facing page: Folio 82R from the Codex Atlanticus, one of several Leonardo da Vinci notebooks that were on view at the Uffizi gallery in Florence CENTURION-MAGAZINE.COM 69
